Summary
The costs to businesses annually due to undetected employee lies are outstanding. The costs of employee misconduct to the company range from somewhere between $6 billion to $200 billion annually in the United States (Berry & Lilly, 2003; Lipman & McGraw, 1988). Around 1/3 of businesses fail each year due to employee theft and personnel crimes according the United States Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, a study conducted in 2002 by Avert, Inc. found that 24% of the 1.8 million job applications whose credentials were checked made falsifications in regards to their qualifications.
The purpose of this study is to develop a framework to determine if a potential employee is indeed lying during a job interview, thus cutting down on the billions of dollars lost annually by businesses as described above.
For this study, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment was designed to find out if there was a difference in response time between liars and truth tellers and the roles social skills play (if any) in these response times. The second experiment was designed to determine response time within the subjects (vs. the first which was between the subjects). For example, if the subject will take longer answering falsely than when answering comparable questions truthfully. Another purpose of this experiment was to determine if making the actual decision to lie will add more response time to yes/no questions.
In the first study, it was hypothesized that answering deceptively will take longer than truth telling due to the construction component required when lying. It was also hypothesized that the higher the participants' social skills, the less time it will take to respond to open-ended questions. This experiment used an experimenta ...